U.S. Fish & Wildlife ServiceIn December 2020, the Service assessed woody vegetation encroachment throughout the historic range of Attwater's prairie-chicken using remotely-sensed data. This assessment used the 2016 National Land Cover Database derived from Landsat imagery (Homer et al. 2020) and the 2019 Global Forest Canopy Height layer derived from satellite-based lidar (Potapov et al. 2020). Multiple studies have found that tree canopy cover is negatively associated with use by greater prairie-chickens for booming grounds and nest sites (Merrill et al. 1999, Niemuth 2005, Gregory et al. 2011, Matthews et al. 2013, Hovick et al. 2015), and 2% tree cover is a level beyond which use for mating and nesting declines abruptly or ceases. Based on this, the Service mapped areas delineated as shrub/scrub, herbaceous, or hay/pasture and having <2% canopy cover taller than 3 m within 1 km. The largest patch of this potential high-quality habitat consisted of 41,877 acres within the Goliad County Study Site. At the Austin-Colorado County Study Site which includes the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, 8,700 of the 58,188 acres (15%) met these criteria; much of the refuge did not meet the criteria due to tall woody vegetation along the San Bernard River and Coushatta Creek. Additional large patches meeting the criteria were located north of Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge (30,030 acres) and west of the Whitmire Unit of Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (16,632 acres). This assessment reaffirmed that the Goliad County Study Site retains the greatest extent of potential high quality habitat and provided a map of areas to evaluate as potential future introduction sites. For more information on Attwater's prairie-chicken, please visit ECOS .ArcGIS FeatureLayerhttps://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/ad28848beb2b46cf9488a71c89113fd9_0engU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Open DataPublicFWS R2 NWRS Attwater prairie-chicken potential high quality habitat [United States]Web servicesUnited StatesLast Modified: 2021-06-03